This week I’m going back to looking at the Lord’s Prayer, one of the supreme expressions of faith in Scripture. Jesus began with those simple, yet radical words of divine-human connection, “Our Father in heaven.” Infinite, intimate God at his most sublime. An invitation to trust and dependence, to rest and surrender. To ultimately become fruitful through his power, rather than ours.

Where does Jesus go from here? His next turn of phrase is, “Hallowed be your name.” Or, as the four year old sister of one of my friends used to put it, “hollow leg be thy name.” It’s the first thing we say after staking our claim as children of God. We ask that the Father’s name be hallowed – be honored as holy. In some ways it seems kind of superfluous, a kind of redundancy or tautology. Of course, God’s name IS holy, even as God is holy. It’s like saying may Wilt Chamberlin be tall, or ice be cold, or great white sharks be terrifying. The question, then is what the Father’s holiness has to do with us.

If we look at Jewish tradition and a number of texts in the Hebrew Scriptures (aka the Old Testament), we find that the idea of sanctifying Gods’ name is an ancient one. For example, one central Jewish prayer is called the Kaddish – the expression of desire for God’s name to be kept holy. Several Bible verses are even more explicit, and give us clarity about what it means to hallow God’s name. To look at just two of them, among many …

First, in Isaiah 8:12-13, the prophet says, “Don’t believe every conspiracy theory the world trots out, and don’t be afraid of what everyone else fears, but it is the Lord whom you should fear as holy.” Isaiah is saying that hallowing the Father’s name means overcoming our fear when the world or our lives are threatened by turmoil, confusion, or disorder. This is true in every age of history. When I was young, the great fear was that the USSR (remember them) would launch he atom bomb against us. I remember lying awake as a child wondering if that night would be the night that WWIII would begin. And we always knew where the shelters were, just in case.

Today’s world feels eerily similar – perhaps more intense, and maybe a bit worse than Isaiah’s day and the years of my childhood. But whether what we face is better, worse, or merely different, the challenge is the same: Fear not. Don’t get caught up in the anxiety mongering of our culture’s many factions. This is one of the most consistent and insistent encouragements of the Bible. In the same discourse that contains the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus describes many of the worry points that beset human beings. There’s what to wear, what to eat, how to provide for ourselves. In other verses, we hear that we don’t have to be anxious about other’s opinions, about wars, disasters, our futures, our children, our economic well-being, about death itself.

How does overcoming our fears in the face of anxiety-inducing circumstances hallow God’s name? Several biblical writers indicate that allowing the Lord to give us peace and courage causes people to look at us and say, “Hmmm … these folks are weird” – in a good way, of course. Staying out of the world’s maelstrom of angst ends up drawing attention to God, not to us. It’s not that we aren’t realistic about the things that cause anxiety – nor do we pretend we aren’t tempted to fear. We simply point outside of ourselves to the Father – like the young men of the Book of Daniel, facing the fiery furnace with the declaration that they would not serve the false gods of Babylon.

Where does this conquering of fear come from? The key lies in a second verse, this one from the Book of Numbers. In chapter 20, there is the painful story of Moses losing it with the people of Israel. Fed up with the Israelites’ complaining, he starts calling them names and goes off on a poor rock with his stick – instead of simply speaking to it in faith. The Lord’s response is to rebuke Moses for “not believing in me to treat me as holy” (Num. 20:12). Moses gave in to the fear and unbelief of the crowd (remember Isaiah’s warning) and ended up in a self-centered blindness. He lost sight of God’s glory and greatness, and the faith that would have kept him trusting and peaceful in the face of public pressure.

Every one of us – even the bravest, the most irenic, the most stolid, the least flappable – comes to the end of his or her natural character strengths (which come from God in the first place). I used to think my father feared nothing. Then my mom came down with Parkinson’s. My dad retired early and began nearly full-time care for her. I watched him deal with the struggle to make sense of putting aside his career and preparing for my mother’s death. Over time, he grew in surrender to the Father’s goodness. He became less and less self-concerned, more full of faith, more loving, more patient. The reasons for his transformation were clear: He trusted in the Lord in ways that had been foreign to him. Ultimately, he found faith and surrender as gifts from Jesus, the one who fully and truly hallowed the Father’s name in everything that he did.

So the two obvious questions for us are these: What am I afraid of or anxious about (and why)? Second, where don’t I believe what the Father says about himself and about me as one of his children? Then we ask for the gift of faith so that we can surrender the unbelief, the fear, and the anxiety …

… And then let’s get to hallowing!